Lady Southcott’s portrait stares down at anyone who enters the old kitchen. She is healthy, rich and supremely unhappy. On her cheek is a shiny purplish brown spider, translucent legs spread out to cover the side of her face. 

This portrait has been passed through generations of my family, as well as an arachnidan family tradition. Some people keep bees; we keep spiders. In the same hallway as the old, unusable kitchen, the three Spider Rooms house a healthy population of false widow spiders found only on our land. Every room has its own music box that plays a lilting tune I have heard nowhere else.

The spiders have never bitten me. They bit my mother once, before I was born, but she still doesn’t discourage me from exploring these rooms and observing the arachnids. 

Unlike most land, our estate was not passed down only to male relatives. Just the oldest surviving heir, and then later, the ones with enough time, money, and drive to keep up the old house. 

The town believes that Lady Southcott was killed by her greed. But I know it was the potatoes.

As The Great Hunger ravaged the Irish people, Lord and Lady Southcott lost much of their income, crops, and workers. The Protestant gentry of Damhán held a certain amount of pity for the starving tenant farmers and allowed them a portion of the potato crop. Of course, the gentry did not make concessions for the potatoes lost to the spreading plant disease, and so many had none left for themselves. 

Though their land yielded more potatoes and other crops than most estates in the town of Damhán, Lord and Lady Southcott did not eat any better than their peers. Lord Southcott had a soft spot for the two families who rented and farmed his land. He invited them into his home on occasion, even paid for a doctor to nurse a young girl and her mother back to health after the rest of their family was gone. Against all odds, the other family lost none of its seven members. 

The doctor was not so lucky with Lord Southcott’s health. The gentleman died an ugly death, his body slowly wasting away while the girl and mother got stronger. 

After her husband’s death, Lady Southcott continued to invite the tenants into her home. She let go of her house staff, who were largely loyal to the lord, and began to throw lavish parties for the Protestant gentry, flaunting her fortune and, most importantly, her surplus of foods—butter, peas, rabbit, beans, fish, honey, potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. The tenants prepared and served the food as they starved or else risked losing their land. 

The young girl and her mother languished in the kitchen under the intense surveillance of members of the other tenant family. Every day, the lady spared one random member of this family from their farming duties to watch the daughter and mother. This overseer was under strict orders to report any missteps. Lady Southcott took pleasure in punishing the daughter for her mother’s fainting spells; the heat pressed all of the water and air from their bodies. 

One day, while her mother gathered strength for the walk home, the daughter snuck away from the servants’ quarters and found a hidden closet. Nearly every shelf was full to the brim with Irish Lumpers. She had never seen this amount of food together, let alone just potatoes. The daughter had never been able to attend the lavish fetes; once all of the courses were prepared, she cleaned the kitchen and cared for her mother. 

The daughter snuck two potatoes into her apron before leading her emaciated mother home. She didn’t dare cook the potatoes in the lady’s kitchen. 

Her discovery gave her the energy to gather some coal, bake the potatoes into a watery soup, and traverse the space between the tenant houses to invite the other family, of whom there were still seven. Everyone got the same amount of food, save for the daughter’s mother. The mother had two bites and promptly threw them up. The rest of her soup went to one of the older sons who often shouldered much of his family’s physical labor. 

The daughter fed her mother sips of water as the feast wound down. She kept her mother as far from the coal oven as possible, though the air was too humid and hot on its own for this to make much of a difference. 

The next day, no one from the other family joined the mother and daughter on their slow trek to Lady Southcott’s kitchen. This was not odd. The two had been leaving earlier and earlier to accommodate the mother’s declining speed. 

Lady Southcott greeted them at the back door. This was very odd. 

She snatched the daughter away by the arm, fast enough to make the mother fall but slow enough to watch as it happened. Lady Southcott dragged the barely protesting daughter through a maze of hallways until they reached a familiar door. The potato room. 

“Two of my potatoes are missing,” the lady said, shoving the girl through the door. “You are now in charge of inventorying them.” She explained that these potatoes last two weeks before they are beyond their prime, and therefore not suitable for her quality fetes. In this hallway were three pantries—newly harvested potatoes, week-old potatoes, two-week-old potatoes. 

At the end of each week, the daughter would be in charge of dumping the old potatoes in the spot behind the mansion where all food waste went to decompose. They were afforded the dignity of rotting in private. 

The oldest child of the other tenant family, the one who had eaten the rest of her mother’s potato soup, stepped forward from the shadows. He was to supervise the daughter in exchange for two of the old potatoes per week to share with his family. 

Only three weeks after being appointed to her new position, the daughter’s mother could no longer walk. Five days after that, the mother was dead. 

The oldest child of the other tenant family got bored watching the daughter count potatoes. He sometimes napped or left to find snacks or harassed the daughter for attention. He tried to encourage her to steal or distract her from counting. But she never did anything wrong. 

She counted and starved and counted and cried and counted and cursed the lady of the house.

Every night, the daughter watched the spiders spin and unspin their webs in the dank corners of her home. More and more of them appeared inside as the weather got colder, but they stayed away from the coal oven. 

One day, she noticed a particularly dense and messy web underneath the oven. She hadn’t used it in days, instead choosing to shiver underneath the ratty blankets she still had. Near the edges floated a purplish brown gem. The daughter reached out to grab it before realizing the gem was really a spider. The familiarity of its shiny body and transparent legs unmasked the memory of a childhood illness.

Years ago, when she was little, a spider like this had bitten her leg. She’d gotten sick—nausea, rash, but most of all, horrible pain. The type of horrible pain she felt in her soul, in her wasting body. The type of horrible pain she wanted Lady Southcott to feel. 

For months, the daughter watched Lady Southcott’s parties growing smaller and smaller as even the landed gentry began to starve. The lady carried on like nothing was happening, even though she herself could have helped these friends. 

Whenever the oldest son was not paying attention, which became more frequent, the daughter explored the Southcott home to locate the lady’s bedroom. On her way, she stole odds and ends—a music box, an old coat of Lord Southcott’s, a book she could not read. She set the book open and upside down under the bed for the spiders to use.

Every night, she curled up on the floor in the lord’s coat and observed the purple and clear-legged spider, then spiders, weaving criss-cross webs underneath the book and eating the woodlice and generally leaving her alone. When she wound up the music box, the spiders seemed to spin faster.

The daughter felt some remorse for stealing a spider from its family. She felt no remorse for placing the spider in Lady Southcott’s bed. She felt no remorse for the second or third spider, either. 

The night she’d captured the fourth spider, the seven members of the other tenant family knocked on her door, informed her that the lady was sick, that they’d called for the doctor and the priest. The daughter was disappointed to learn that the priest was just a precaution. 

The daughter joined the seven others and ran to the house as fast as their weak bodies could go. They entered Lady Southcott’s room, stood in the back. She was sleeping. She looked healthy as long as no one looked too closely at the angry welts on her arm. When everyone was watching the priest perform Last Rites, the daughter slipped into the closet and waited for the room to empty. 

Lady Southcott’s face was twisted in agony, her muscles rigid and veins sticking out on her neck. Wearing the lord’s old coat, the daughter stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight streaming in from the window. The lady saw her husband’s spirit approach her bed, emaciated and starved. Practically a skeleton. And here the lady was, well-fed, generally healthy, apathetic enough not to die of stress. Still, the lady was in inexplicable physical pain, her muscles seizing and her brain spinning.  

The daughter stalked forward until the lady could see that she was neither the lord nor a ghost. Simply a starving girl. 

“Does it hurt?” the daughter asked, plucking a small vial from her coat pocket along with a stolen potato. The daughter knew the lady didn’t count the potatoes, didn’t check on the numbers. Still, it was the first one she’d stolen since those two at the beginning. The potato she set on the nightstand next to the heavy pain medication prescribed by the doctor, just out of reach but still visible to the lady in bed. The daughter held up the vial to show its contents to the lady. “Are you in pain?” The daughter could not let the lady die if she hadn’t suffered. 

Improbably, Lady Southcott smiled. “Foolish girl. It has always hurt.” 

The daughter slapped the widow’s face, leaving a bright pink imprint on her cheek. The cork popped as the daughter opened the vial and plucked the contents out by its leg. The spider fit perfectly into the red spot on the widow’s cheek. She poked the spider until it bit down, releasing the final, fatal dose of venom into Lady Southcott’s body. “Good.”

Over the next few weeks, the Southcott estate turned over its entire staff. Six of the seven remaining tenant farmers were sent to a different farm after a last meal and gift of ten potatoes. The oldest child, a son, went missing, presumed cause of death starvation. 

Lady Southcott made a miraculous recovery despite never calling on the doctor or priest again. She never threw a lavish dinner party again. Everyone the lady employed to farm her land got an equal share in the crops. The excess food was sold, though none of it ever left the country. The potato closets were cleared out and divvied up. 

Slowly, the famine came to an end. The prosperity of the Southcott farm was no longer notable; it was instead moderate, normal. Soon the estate was no longer an estate. The newly generous lady allowed the hardworking tenants to purchase their own land, until the lady only owned the house and a modest lawn around it. The farmers still shared their wealth among each other and the lady. 

The lady married again, this time to a young farmer about the age of the girl who had poisoned her. In fact, Lady Southcott seemed to have reclaimed her youth. 

Lady Southcott was not killed by her greed. She was killed by excess potatoes. She was killed by the venom of a rare spider found on a small plot of Irish land. She was killed by the daughter of a starved mother. 

I know all of this because she told me herself. The daughter of the starved mother lived longer than anyone could have imagined during the Great Hunger. She redistributed wealth in her small corner of the world. She placed a symbolic potato on the lady’s nightstand and a practical venomous spider on the lady’s cheek. And then she took the lady’s name. 

–Ryn Baginski

P.S. Thanks to the best sister ever, Alisha, for giving me feedback!

Resources:

• The real spiders that inspired the ones in this story.
  • Black widow spider bite symptoms and treatments.
  • Noble false widow spider bite symptoms and treatments.
  • Common spiders in Ireland.
  • How to milk spiders for venom to use for antivenoms (or poison…)
• Info on the Irish Potato Famine.
• Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum website.
• Info on landed gentry and what the hell that means.